Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman is a Plant Spirit Medicine Practitioner specializing in sacred plant medicines for communication and relationship. Believing strongly in the necessity of hybrid medicine to meet the unique challenges of modern life, Yaya is engaged in the continued study of Plant Medicine, Active Dreaming, and Goddess Traditions from around the world as gateways into the richness of direct personal experience of uncurated reality. A Devotee, Artist, and Mother of primarily Taino and Irish descent, Yaya offers multi-dimensional, plant medicine assisted, sex-positive prayer spaces, and healing experiences designed to help you integrate all that you have encountered on your soul’s journey and come to live from a place of deep understanding of the way that each of your life experiences has contributed to the uniqueness and potency of your personal spirit medicine.
In this episode, Yaya shares her experience of being of mixed descent and the braided blood of the Taino indigenous people. She shares how she’s developed a relationship with the land she lives on and how she likens being in relationship with the land to being in a romantic relationship. We talk about the cyclical wheel of the year to foster reconnection to nature and how linear time is a tool that can facilitate a certain way of being, but that doesn’t necessarily need to be adhered to. And finally, we talk about plant allies for a time of racial uprising and healing from white supremacy and how Yaya has found the medicine of kava to enable her to feel herself in a time when we lose ourselves.
“Linear time is a tool and so we have a choice of if and how we choose to use that tool. What we do need is to find and adhere to our own natural rhythm.” -Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman
Resources:
- I mention the Spirit Weavers Gathering virtual weave where Yaya taught a workshop called Braided Blood
- Yaya mentions Caroline Arnold, her friend and land steward as someone who has helped her to do her work
- Yaya names her Tantric teacher, Laura Amazzone
More from Yaya Erin Rivera Merriman:
- Active Culture Family
- Active Culture Family on Patreon
- Yaya’s course Dreaming with the Ancestors
- Medicine Mandala
- Bridge Temple
- @activeculturefamily on Instagram
